The stone came up before anyone had finished shouting. Yseult put both hands against the shelf and the rock answered, a curved wall rising out of the floor of the ledge in a rough arc perhaps five feet high, and the light above her palm shrank to nothing in the same instant because she could not hold both. The chamber went dark. Something enormous struck the far side of the wall.
TLN: BEHIND IT. EVERYONE BEHIND IT.
He was already moving, catching Finn's arm and Briar's collar and putting both of them bodily behind the stone, and Arthur felt a hand on his own shoulder shove him left as the impact came again and a section of the wall's upper edge came away in pieces.
YSE: I can't do the light and the walls.
COR: Then do the walls.
YSE: You'll be fighting blind.
COR: Do it anyway.
It was not entirely dark. That was the thing Arthur held onto. The crystals held light the way still water holds it, and the ninety seconds of Yseult's glow had left the whole vast chamber faintly, dimly luminous, a residual blue-green wash that showed edges and shapes and nothing else. So he did not see the arachnid. He saw the absence where it was: a shifting black mass against the faintly glowing wall, twenty feet across and moving in a way nothing that size should move, legs coming down on the ledge with a hard clicking impact that arrived out of the dark from a slightly different place each time.
ELS: I need to know where it is.
BRR: Left. It's going left.
ELS: How do you know?
BRR: Because in about a second it's going to be at the left end of the wall and I've already seen that.
He said it in a very flat voice, the way people say things when they are managing.
BRR: Now.
Elsie fired. The pellet went through something. She heard it rather than saw it, a wet percussive sound and then a shriek that came out of the arachnid at a pitch that made Finn press both hands over his ears, and the mass on the ledge recoiled and reset and came again from a different angle entirely.
ELS: I hit it.
BRR: You hit a leg.
ELS: It has a considerable number of legs, Briar.
BRR: I'm aware. I'm managing expectations.
Arthur and Corin went out from behind the wall together. There was no discussion. Arthur went right because Corin went left, and afterward he could not identify a single moment where either of them had decided anything, and he came around the stone into the dark with a sword he could barely see and something enormous ahead of him that he could see even less. He struck at a leg. It was like hitting a fencepost. The blade bit and stuck and the whole limb wrenched sideways and took Arthur with it, and his shoulder, the shoulder that had not been right since the Trial, that had been carrying grain sacks for three days, came apart in a way that he felt distinctly and audibly. He went down. He got up. He had gotten up nineteen times in the Trial against a man who could stop the world and he was not going to fail to do it here, and he got his sword back into his left hand and kept moving, because the shoulder had gone somewhere past useful.
COR: Arthur!
ART: I'm fine!
Corin was better at this than anyone had any business being. He did not strike at the legs. He went past them, under and through, moving inside the reach of something twenty feet across with the same speed that had taken Dane Whitlock's jaw off its hinges, and he put the sword into the joint where a leg met the body and drove it and twisted and was gone again before the whole enormous mass had finished reacting. It shrieked again.
YSE: WALL.
The stone came up in front of the two of them exactly late enough to be terrifying and exactly early enough to matter, and the arachnid hit it and the arc buckled inward and did not break. Yseult made a sound behind it. Arthur, on one knee with his right arm hanging, looked back and saw her on both hands with her head down and her breathing gone entirely wrong.
TLN: She's finished.
MRA: How finished?
TLN: Mira, she's on the floor.
Finn raised his hands.
FNN: I could-
BRR: NO.
FNN: You don't know what I was going to say.
BRR: You were going to say you could clap. You were going to gamble on a coin flip in a cave with a wall that's already cracked and a girl who can't stand up.
FNN: ...Yes.
BRR: Then no.
FNN: Right. Fair.
He put his hands down.
FNN: I hate this. I want it noted that I hate this and I have no way of helping.
TLN: Get Yseult behind the second wall.
FNN: That I can do.
Elsie kept firing. She had fourteen seconds and she spent them in twos and threes, compression and release, aiming at the shifting dark by sound and by Briar's one-second warnings, and she put a pellet through the base of a leg and another into the joint Corin had already opened and the arachnid's movement changed. It slowed. It was still enormous and it was still on the ledge and it could still, Arthur understood, kill any of them in a single motion. But something had gone out of the way it came forward. It had stopped simply arriving and had started choosing, testing, drawing back after each exchange instead of pressing through it.
MRA: It's hesitating.
ELS: It's hurt.
MRA: Those aren't the same thing.
She had come out from behind the wall.
TLN: Mira-
MRA: I know. Don't touch me.
She walked forward. Arthur, on his knees ten feet away with his sword in the wrong hand, watched Mira Doyle walk out onto open stone toward a wounded thing four times her height and stop with perhaps fifteen feet between them. She did not raise her hands. There was nothing to raise.
MRA: Look at me.
It looked at her. He could not have said how he knew that. There was nothing in the shape of it he could read, no face he could locate in the dark, and yet the whole enormous mass of it went still in a way that was unmistakably attention.
MRA: I've only ever done this with birds.
She said it very quietly, and Arthur understood she was not speaking to the spider.
MRA: Foxes once. A dog that wouldn't stop. Nothing that could kill me.
The arachnid shifted its weight.
MRA: Look at me properly.
Nothing happened for four seconds. Then the front of it came down. It was not a collapse. It was slower and considerably more deliberate than that, the forward legs folding by degrees until the body dropped and the whole vast shape of it settled against the stone of the ledge, and the clicking stopped, and the chamber went entirely silent except for Yseult's breathing behind the wall.
MRA: Good girl.
Mira stood in front of it with her hands at her sides.
MRA: It's done.
BRR: Is it-
MRA: It's done, Briar. It's stopped thinking it owns this room.
She did not move.
MRA: I would very much like someone to come and stand near me, please. I'm going to fall over shortly and I'd rather not do it alone out here.
Talon was there before she finished the sentence. They came out slowly. Yseult could not walk unassisted and made it through the squeeze with Finn ahead of her and Corin behind, which she complained about the entire way in a voice with nothing behind it. Arthur went through on his left side with his right arm strapped across his chest with Elsie's belt. Mira went last, and stopped at the gap, and looked back into the dark at a great settled shape that had not moved since it went down.
MRA: It'll get up when we're gone.
ELS: Will it come after us?
MRA: No.
ELS: How do you know?
MRA: Because it doesn't want to. It will be as friendly as I am to anyone who enters its home. That's the entire scope of my ability.
Briar stopped six feet from the entrance on the way out. There was a crystal on the floor of the passage, broken off some formation a long time ago and worn smooth by the draught, about the size of a thumb joint. Blue going into amber at one end. He picked it up and turned it over twice and put it in his pocket.
BRR: For the workshop.
Nobody argued. They came out onto the shelf into a late afternoon so bright it hurt, and sat down on the warm stone, all eight of them, and for a considerable while nobody said anything at all.
FNN: I want everyone to know.
ELS: Finn.
FNN: I want everyone to know that Rufus Hale said two of them were just holes, and he said the third one would take the wind out of you, and at no point did that man mention the spider.